| PRODUCT DETAILS | | Hustle |  | |
Hustle
Everybody "hustles"-especially in Los Angeles where suicides, strip joints, shootouts, porno movies, the mob and murder combine into a collage. Caught in this web of modern reality is an old fashioned detective (Reynolds). A moralist who still sees the difference between right and wrong, he can hardly reconcile himself to the ugliness of his job. By day he investigates a young girl's suicide, while at night he relaxes with a high-priced Paris call girl (Deneuve).
Manufacturer: Paramount
Price: $7.49
 Hustle
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| User Reviews |  | Watching this movie reminds one of how bad an actor Burt really is/was
rating: 2
Would you believe there was time I thought Burt Reynolds was a good actor (Sharkey's Machine)? But even in "Deliverance" I didn't think he was that great. I just keep seeing him as "The Bandit" driving around, making an a** of himself, while being chased by Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason). I also realize how bad an actress Catherine Deneuve was when I watched this flick. Beautiful and gorgeous, but terrible acting.Burt kinda' plays his old Dan August part in this movie. The interaction between Reynolds and Deneuve borders on hilarious; when they're trying to be serious. Seriously.
It must have been that period of time when acting was different. Even Paul Winfield comes across like he's doing a reading at an audition. His scene with "The Albino" is terrible (i.e. stereotypically laughable).
Ben Johnson and Eileen Brennan contribute to this slow, laborious undertaking in establishing the plot. Ugh!
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BETTER THAN SOME.......NOT AS GOOD AS OTHERS.
rating: 3
HUSTLE is better than some other Burt Reynolds movies, while not as good as others. The film is a very good film, however, a problem arises in that the subject matter is very sleazy, many of the people are sleazy, and in the end the movie suffers from all the sleaze.
I'm a Burt Reynolds fan, always have been, so when I watch one of his movies I am pretty much happy to watch ole Burt do his thing, which is entertain. I've been able to collect some of his DVDs with this one being a recent acquisition. I had seen the picture when originally released and it did not make much more of an impression on me back then than now, some 33 years later. The list of actors is impressive but the final script is depressing, overall serving to drag the movie down even farther, you keep watching because you want to know how it all comes out.
But Gloria's problems and resultant suicide are not much different from many other similar lost souls of the 1970s, and to build an entire movie around this doesn't quite work. And then the relationship between Burt and Catherine is unravelling and doesn't work at all. But just when you think they will surmount their problems, crawl out from under all the sleaze, the movie ends in an entirely unsatisfactory manner offering more sleaze to an already overly sleazy movie.
The film looks very dated and stark in a film noir way, while the dress and smoking and drinking all give an aura that is strictly 1970s. For me the 70s decade did not serve up the best ambience and this movie reflects all that, moreover brings it back all too vividly. Not too many folks would choose to relive the 1970s. And my 'armchair director's award' goes to Ben Johnson, he pretty much gives whatever spark is present in this movie.
I will continue to rewatch this thing, but for me I take an ending away that somehow evaded the director:
Burt doesn't stop at the liquor store, no, he is too pumped and excited to get into that weekend with Catherine, and when he asks her to marry, she says yes, and they both break out into another life. He quits, she quits, they start anew.
Crazy you say, not at all. Today many movies have alternate endings, I just cannot abide the stupid ending in this movie. Throughout the movie Burt tells Marty he ain't a professional. Well in this last scene Burt's standing up, out in the open, with a snub nosed .38 firing at a fleeing car is just not professional, not even smart. Talk about throwing peanuts at a fleeing elephant. And then how many liquor store robbers are going be able to shoot center, bulls eye, while moving excitedly away from someone with the distance continually increasing? Sorry, not plausible for anyone who ever infrequently handled firearms, pistols especially. They buried Wild Bill a long time back, the age of the shootist is way past.
Semper Fi.
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Busted
rating: 2
An L.A. cop and a murder victim's father struggle with their realization that all women are prostitutes in this washed-out DVD of a middling 70s thriller. Burt's amusing flippancy in most scenes undercuts what elsewhere tries to be a morally murky drama, and long romantic scenes dull the thriller pace. The picture's blatant misogyny doesn't help matters.
Most of the scenes are set bound so except for Burt's sweet ride we don't get much period flavor. The whole thing plays like a very foul-mouthed T.V. episode and the vulgarities are so plentiful and tin-eared that even by today's standards they may shock.
Amid some rank overacting, Eddie Albert as the affable but venal villain clearly steals the picture.
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The good, the bad and the indifferent
rating: 3
At times it's hard to know quite what to make of Hustle. There's certainly a good film in there, but there's also a bad one as well and Robert Aldrich doesn't make the two into something entirely cohesive. Joseph Biroc's photography is somewhat schizophrenic too. The police station interiors and night shots look great with a classic neo-noir look to them with their deep blacks, but some of the daytime work looks like painfully artificial TV movie stuff. Some of the editing is awkward and some of the writing so on the nose it's like someone decided to film `My First Cop Movie' while the references to Moby Dick (the film, not the book) come over as Symbolism 101, but then it delivers something good enough for you to want to file away and use yourself at a later date.
Where it scores is in its portrait of a job and a place where you can all too easily lose all sense of yourself, a side of Los Angeles the film captures remarkably well (there's a reason so many Angelinos move to different States or even countries). Burt Reynolds' cop is so desensitized to his job that he obliviously talks to the morgue staff about football scores while escorting a father to see his daughter's dead body, behavior no-one finds shocking in a place where people only count if they're `somebody.' In many ways the most impressive thing about it is its determination to avoid becoming a murder mystery: no-one, least of all Reynolds, has any interest in investigating a murder, and neither does the film. Instead it's more interested in the emotional fallout from the death and how it affects (or rather fails to affect) those around the death. It all ends in violence, naturally, albeit with the caveat that you end up paying for the sins you didn't commit rather than the ones you you did.
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Good Message, Poor Movie
rating: 2
I like these types of movies, and saw the DVD on sale for $9, so I gave it a look. With Burt Reynolds and Catherine Deneuve being movie legends I figured what did I have to lose. Unfortunately, the movie really misses the mark and is not very good, except for the message. Slow and predictable, it reminds me of a bad Frank Sinatra's movie.
Robert Aldrich, who did a masterful job on "The Longest Yard - 1974" was the director, and he and Burt were the film's producer. The film really needed a good producer and it might have been better. However, it was great to see Deneuve in a U.S. film and the DVD quality is very good.
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Hustle
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